About Us and our Obsession With Classic Movies
Hello, and welcome to Classic-Movie-Reviews.com. We’re glad you’re here, and we’re doubly glad that you, like us, find nothing to be more enjoyable, or funny, or sad, or name-your-emotion-and-we-want-to-feel-it-with-you downright memorable than seeing a film from an era when going to a movie in a theater, or movie house, or an oh-so-fancy cinema was something to be relished and cherished. Honestly, we like just about any genre of the art: American movie classics like My Man Godfrey are just as entertaining to us as something from a so-called “auteur” like Fritz Lang, director of the 1927 German silent science fiction movie classic, Metropolis. We love the look and feel of classic movies. We’re inspired by the speech patterns of characters from 1940s movies, for example, and wonder why people today no longer talk in those crisp, staccato tones and inflections. It’s only been 60 years since that decade ended. How can we have lost that lovely way of speaking so relatively quickly? And we definitely believe something’s lacking in many classic movie reviews today. They seem to us to be more like a short synopsis and a “go buy it right now!” blurb. Where’s the joy in that?
Let’s be honest: Sometimes old movies are not classic movies. What was bad back in 1935 probably would be just as bad today. Poor dialogue, terrible scripts, wooden acting and shoddy camerawork could be just as prevalent (and maybe even more so) back then as it is today, when anybody with a two-thousand dollar digital movie camera can set himself up as a director or film-maker. We think what sets actual classic movies apart from their more common siblings — the plain old “movies” we see all day, every day, wherever we look — are the things that can make a very few of today’s movies “classic,” which is that their acting, and stories, and production values are so exceptional that they leave an indelible mark upon the memory banks of most anybody who has ever had the good fortune to see them.
In Classic-Movie-Reviews.com, which is a product of a love we have for classic movies that also happen to be old movies, we hope to look at many different examples of the art of movie, or film (for you students of the art of cinema out there) making. We go weak-kneed at the thought of classic old comedy movies, or classic old Western movies (how about Stagecoach, huh?) or our current favorite; classic old science fiction movies (Forbidden Planet is as insightful today as it was back in 1954, we believe). Because old-time Hollywood really served as the incubator for the industry which grew up around film-making, we think American movie classics like Only Angels Have Wings, which is a 1939 story of aviators and the dangers they faced, both while flying and then back on the ground, are good reasons to stay at home with the television permanently tuned to one of those stations that specializes in showing old movies — that are also classic movies, naturally — at all hours of the day or night.
Our self-appointed mission is to deliver to you classic movie reviews that are more than just a basic restatement of a plot and a listing of the major actors. You can go anywhere for that. And we hope to NEVER give away any movie’s ending, at least deliberately. No, our aim is to take an example from any one of several hundred thousand classic movies, and sometimes just old movies, out there and make you want to go out and buy it or even just rent it, if only for a single night of learning how really comically brilliant Charlie Chaplin could be, or how zany and wacky an acting genius like classic movie star Carole Lombard truly was.
So, think about the kinds of films you like. Are they science fiction movies or old Western movies? We’ve got you covered. Or maybe once in awhile you’d like to read a little bit about old comedy movies, if only for a brief diversion from the workaday concerns which seem to eat up more and more of our precious time. Consider us the people who are going to help you learn enough about some classic movie you may have heard about to decide whether or not you really want to take the time to see it.
We’d be lying if we told you that what we’re intending to do here is some sort of chore. But we’d never be able to pull off the deception. It’s a certain class of old movies that makes us happy, and we mean to spread our love of them to all of you through well-written and interesting classic movie reviews. So sit back in that home theater lounger you bought especially for watching classic old movies in. We’ll bring the popcorn and the licorice whips (it’s our pleasure, and besides that, we’re also hungry) while you concentrate on the classic movies we’ll be telling you about as often and as completely as we can. Without giving away the endings, of course.